Crying ‘Fascist’ in Eastern Europe

Those who see the specter of authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary are making a huge mistake.

A specter is haunting Eastern Europe. The prevailing view among Western observers is that the region is on the verge of sliding backwards into autocracy, driven by the resurgent forces of nationalism, nativism, and populism. The rise of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Law and Justice Party are routinely portrayed as harbingers of an authoritarian takeover. The European Union’s recent reprimand of Hungary for democratic backsliding is another warning sign. Eastern Europe is supposedly well on its way to abandoning liberal democracy, as Orbán and his ilk take their place on the pantheon of global strongmen next to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and China’s Xi Jinping. This theme is evident across the media spectrum, from straightforward news accounts (the New York Times), to highbrow political science (Francis Fukuyama in the American Interest), to lefty polemics (The Guardian).

The trouble with this view is that it is wrong, relying on sweeping claims about the region’s trajectory while failing to distinguish between fundamentally different political systems. It’s not that illiberal symptoms are absent from Eastern Europe’s body politic. Less than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it would be premature to take the health of liberal democracy in the region for granted. But the idea that Eastern Europe is on an inevitable track towards authoritarianism, or that its current crop of right-wing populists should be lumped in with Putin, is fundamentally misguided.

Even those leery of conservative populism should acknowledge some basic facts. The case of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the bete noire of European lefties, is instructive. Orbán has exhibited genuinely illiberal tendencies. His party’s recent proposal to ban gender studies in Hungarian universities is troubling. The Hungarian media landscape is increasingly inhospitable to independent journalism. The state media channel, which has disproportionate influence in rural Hungary, is noticeably slanted towards Orbán’s Fidesz party. The Hungarian prime minister’s tendency to invoke “illiberal democracy,” an ambiguous term with troubling overtones, hasn’t helped matters.

These are worrying indicators, but they don’t mean that Budapest has become, in the words of one overheated editorial, “Moscow on the Danube.” Pursuing independent journalism in Russia is a genuinely dangerous occupation. This past winter, Moscow residents scrawled opposition candidates’ names into snow banks to get their streets cleared. Electoral opposition to Vladimir Putin is negligible.

The recent Hungarian elections, by contrast, were vigorously contested by parties on both the left and right. Opposition billboards and signs were abundantly evident in Budapest and across the country. Public protests have not been suppressed. The internet is still an open forum for debate. And while Orbán remains in office, Fidesz did lose a consequential mayoral election in the run up to the national vote (in a country of 10 million, mayoral elections do count as significant).

Critics of Orbán tend to gloss over these facts. According to Vox, the recent Fidesz victory is entirely attributable to Orban’s stranglehold on the media and the country’s political institutions. Left unmentioned is the relatively strong state of the Hungarian economy and the fragmented state of the opposition. Fidesz has been extremely fortunate in the quality of its opponents—the largest left-wing party is tainted by its communist era-roots while Jobbik, the second-biggest vote getter, is in the midst of an awkward rebranding effort from neo-fascist gadfly to respectable center-right alternative. Attempting to explain the recent Hungarian election without reference to these facts is about as convincing as attributing Donald Trump’s 2016 victory solely to Russian interference.

Developments in Poland have provoked similarly over-the-top reactions. A new law that criminalizes blaming Poles for the Holocaust is an unwise infringement on freedom of speech, but it is not, pace the law’s critics, a sign of incipient fascism. The Holocaust is a fraught subject in Poland, and we make ample allowance for speech limitations in other liberal democracies. Surely there is room to criticize the Polish law without resorting to hyperbolic predictions of an impending fascist takeover.

Lumping in Poland and Hungary with genuinely authoritarian regimes is not only wrong, it may actually prove counterproductive to the gradual spread of liberal institutions. For most of the second half of the 20th century, the liberal democratic club was restricted to North America, Western Europe, and a few countries on the Asia-Pacific periphery. This small group was bound together by wealth, a common Cold War enemy, and, in many cases, shared history and political traditions. But if liberalism is to continue expanding outside its historic core, it must make allowances for local political and social realities. Such flexibility is not unprecedented: Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has been in power almost continuously for over 50 years, yet we accept that this is a product of a consensus-based political culture, not a sign that Japan is an authoritarian, one-party state.

Broadly speaking, countries in Central and Eastern Europe are culturally traditional and touchy about issues related to their national sovereignty, a legacy of Soviet domination and longer historical memories of foreign rule. Given the circumstances, it is unsurprising that Poland and Hungary are suspicious of EU overreach and wary of mass migration. Critics would do well to consider the region’s history before summarily expelling either country from the liberal club.

Why are Western observers so quick to pronounce the death of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe? Alarmist predictions of looming fascism appeal to our desire for grand historical narratives, neatly inverting earlier ideas about the inevitable spread of liberal democracy in favor of a darker story. History is always on the march, and it is either advancing or retreating—there is no room for stasis, minor backsliding, or incremental reform. This narrative is powerful and easy to grasp, but it offers little room for a nuanced understanding of Eastern European politics.

It is also hard to escape the feeling that Poland and Hungary come in for disproportionate criticism because their leaders are outspoken skeptics of immigration and the EU. A recent New York Times story breathlessly warned that Romania is in danger of becoming an “illiberal democracy” like Hungary and Poland, but by any objective measure, Romania’s political institutions are not noticeably healthier than those of its neighbors. According to the Economist’s 2017 Democracy Index, all three countries fall into the category of “flawed democracies,” and both Hungary and Poland rate better than Romania. Freedom House’s 2018 “Freedom in the World” ranking has Poland ahead of Romania and Hungary only slightly behind. All three countries undoubtedly qualify as “flawed democracies,” but apparently authoritarianism only looms if you criticize Brussels.

It is entirely reasonable to worry about the health of liberalism in Eastern Europe. Less reasonable is the view that Euro-skepticism or opposition to immigration is damning evidence of creeping fascism. Considering their history and relative poverty, it is understandable that Eastern European leaders are less enthusiastic about mass migration than their Western counterparts. For those who care about the continued vitality of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe, it would be foolish to insist that liberalism can’t accommodate a range of views on contentious issues like immigration. If forced to choose between national sovereignty and liberal democracy, many Eastern Europeans may decide they prefer the former. Let’s not force them to make that choice.

Will Collins is an English teacher who lives and works in Eger, Hungary.

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39 Responses to Crying ‘Fascist’ in Eastern Europe

For the love of God. First Russia has its issues as do all societies but in the grand sweep of human history perfectly fine and by comparison to the US has the potential to work things out in a more human direction. Hungary, where I have also have spent plenty of time, is frankly doing better than much of (non Scandavian/Germanic) Europe and just fine. Whoever this hysterical liberal is, its uninteresting to publish articles on why country X doesn’t conform to the dysfunctional expectations of the worlds leading rogue state. Please just stop publishing this kind of thing.

Here in the Netherlands the narrative about Orban in the MSM is not that he is fascist but corrupt, enriching a small group of family and friends with EU-funds which were meant for the country’s infrastructure and such. In short: not fascism, but maffia and the whole posture about national souvereignty and preservation of cultural and Christian values is a charade.

I still tend to trust the MSM in my country. If I am a fool for that, please let me know.

On national souvereignty: there is simply no such thing in absolute terms when one is a member of the EU and that includes immigration of course, because the EU has only an outside border, not inside borders, when it comes to the free movement of people. That is the whole point of the EU. Just like no state in the US can be part of the Union and claim to strive for national souvereignty and prevent people from moving from, let’s say, Maine to Texas.

It seems Orban wants the same as Brexiteers: have their cake AND eat it. Sorry, not possible. Orban is about to find out, just like the Tory party in Britain.

The Holocaust is divisive in Poland. Bear with me – I have to explain why the children and grandchildren of the secret police are still fighting the children and grandchildren of the AK Resistance.
While criminals and simply bad people did exploit the situation, Poland on the whole had a very honourable record during the Holocaust – 50,000 Poles were recorded as executed by the Germans for helping Jews. 2-3 million ethnic Poles were killed by the Germans, 1.5 million of whom died in German camps.
But postwar there were pogroms.
The Stalinist secret police throughout Eastern Europe carried out coordinated pogroms in 1946/47 on orders from Moscow. Stalin wanted a repeat of the 1936-39 Arab Revolt in Palestine, which was caused by limited Jewish immigration. This time he wanted to unleash mass Jewish immigration into Palestine and trigger an upsurge in Arab nationalism across the region, to harm Western oil interests and threaten the Suez Canal. He succeeded – his pogroms propelled 700,000 Jews to leave Eastern Europe in 1946-48.
The problem comes when you realize that – and this is an historically proven and evidenced fact – the secret police in Poland was majority Jewish in its senior ranks. The Jews who remained in Poland were small in number (30,000), tightly-knit and overwhelmingly hardline Communist. They clustered in central government, secret police and propaganda/Communist culture roles. People who specialized in hunting down and killing AK Resistance fighters and blackening their name with propaganda.
Exactly the same tightly-knit group who – one generation later – led Poland into post-Communism in 1989. The Jeffrey Sachs transformation plan (“Balcerowicz Plan”) was even written up in Polish in the offices of the incredibly influential newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, whose core, founding journalists all hail from the postwar Stalinist Jewish grouping. The mother (Krystyna Poznanska) of one of them – Konstanty Gebert/Dawid Warszawski – was even a senior secret police officer during the aborted Rzeszow pogrom of 1945.
And who do the populists hail as their heros? The AK Resistance. Some of them are even directly related.
So the children of the Stalinist Jews who organized pogroms against their fellow (non-Communist) Jews after the war are waging a propaganda war to blame the AK Resistance for killing Jews during the Holocaust and during the postwar pogroms.
The question is: How long will people accept Stalinist propaganda?

It is nearly impossible for Western European elites to see Eastern Europeans as anything other than backward and autocratic;

As several historians explain, the very notion of “Western Civilization”, invented during the “Enlightenment”, rests on the idea of the Eastern European “Other”. This original “Other” was soon complemented with Africans, Arabs, Asians, Indians, etc. It paid big dividends ($$$) during the Western European colonial phase. This ideology retains its potency to this day;

Without maintaining this construct, the notion of Western European cultural supremacy would begin to evaporate. Hence, seeing fascists or other uncouth characters in Eastern Europeans, is a necessary and natural thing for them;

This is rather well understood outside the Western European bubble, and one reason why these Western European elites are mostly ignored outside their echo chamber.

Former client states of the Soviet Union joined the EU in order to catch up with the Western world. But if Brussels disagrees with the majority of the voters in an important matter like immigration it becomes obvious that member states are also client states of the EU. Is the high price of diminished sovereignty really worth paying? The disobedience of Hungary and Poland and now also of Italy gives the disgruntled voters all over the EU a voice and may help to cut back the European Union to a less ambitious and more popular institution.

Your argument is that these regimes are not fascist because they haven’t yet built death camps for the opposition. Perhaps the West should put as much pressure as possible on these places — which have exactly zero history of democratic institutions or practices older than 1989 — to prevent them from building death camps? We want to prevent these places from becoming nightmares so we protest before that happens.

For the love of God. First Russia has its issues as do all societies but in the grand sweep of human history perfectly fine and by comparison to the US has the potential to work things out in a more human direction. Hungary, where I have also have spent plenty of time, is frankly doing better than much of (non Scandavian/Germanic) Europe and just fine. Whoever this hysterical liberal is, its uninteresting to publish articles on why country X doesn’t conform to the dysfunctional expectations of the worlds leading rogue state. Please just stop publishing this kind of thing.

The author is largely correct in what he says. And, indeed, in what he doesn’t expressly say, namely, that most of the criticism is coming from Americans, whose ignorance of all things European is more or less a standing joke over here. Democracy is relatively new in Europe. Even Britain held its first election under universal male suffrage only in 1918. None of the ex-communist countries had any serious experience of democracy before 1990 and most had none at all. They’re learning as they go along. American interests have been whipping up and financing European ethnic nationalism with a view to destroying the EU and have thereby created a conflict between Russian nationalism and the nationalisms of the former communist countries. (A lovely example of the way in which the various American anti-EU scams cut across and nullify each other!) The leaders of both Hungary and Poland know perfectly well that the alternative to the EU is Putin’s tanks. The leaders of the other Member States know that as well. The rest is just politics as usual, European style.

The United States is wracked with out-of-control health care costs, an opioid epidemic, millions who are functionally illiterate, large regions and many cities that are economic wastelands saturated with unemployment, a totally corrupt political culture run by money grubbing parasites and a Security State that flushes over $1 TRILLION a year down the toilet playing the Global Cop Gorilla.

Those clowns in DC think that they can rescue Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus, Tripoli, Kiev, Tehran, etc., etc., etc. when they can’t even rescue Detroit or Newark.

The Elite talking head harpies in the U.S. point to the splinters in the eyes of other countries while ignoring the planks in the eye of the U.S.

The countries of Eastern Europe have free and open elections. Who those people vote for is their business. The governance model they configure is their business. The lecturing hacks in the U.S. should butt out.

The last thing Europe or any country needs is tendentious moralizing from the Global Cop Gorilla in bed with the odious Saudis and ruthless Israelis, ready to engage in economic and political subversion at will, to say nothing of using its War Machine and threats of death and destruction as its principle foreign policy tactic.

How is Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice Party any worse than the the oily Reptiles in DC and the rotten, cronied-up Democrat and Republican political parties?

History shows that in Eastern Europe rightwing authoritarianism leads to fascism.

Has it ever occured to you that Mussolini started off as a Socialist, and the Nazi party also called itself as National Socialist, in a period when leftwing authoritarianism in bolshevik Russia/USSR had already killed and persecuted more people that Hitler and Mussolini combined would ever do?

Orban in the MSM is not that he is fascist but corrupt, enriching a small group of family and friends with EU-funds which were meant for the country’s infrastructure and such.

Yes, he is so corrupt that under their government the minimum wage doubled, the purchase power significantly improved, theere is not a single economical parameter that would not have shown substantial strengthening, coupled with substantial investment in infrastructure, along with keeping the state budget deficit constantly below the 3% Maastricht level for several years – a feat that those leftists (along with their MSM media pawns) who now scream about corruption could never achieve. Not once.

I gave a long explanation of why the allegation od “fascism” is used in Poland.
Essentially, the “Liberals” who feature many people from the second and third generation of the secret police are scared that Westerners will discover the truth about the fact that their forbears carried out pogroms after the war, to kickstart Jewish immigration into Palestine and a repeat of the 1936-39 Arab revolt. This formed part of a coordinated policy across the whole of Eastern Europe, resulting in 700,000 non-Communist Jews leaving. War duly erupted in the Middle East, harming Western oil interests and threatening the Suez Canal.

Ugh, just quickly – given that he lives in Hungary, I’m surprised how little Mr. Collins has to say about other illiberal changes introduced by Mr. Orban. His dismantling of any judicial independence makes FDR’s court-packing plan an exercise in executive restraint.

If anything like that was happening in the US, I am confident that not just the MSM, but also TAC would be screaming to high heavens about executive coup d’etat, and justly so.

You can’t qualify democracy with an ideological qualifier be it liberal or illiberal. It doesn’t make sense. Because those who don’t share the ideology are de facto excluded. Excluding arbitrarily some of the people is completely undemocratic; like German Democratic Republic or Somali Democratic Republic.

Central and Eastern Europe, it’s people and leaders, are the only shining beacons of hope in Europe at the moment, trying to preserve Europe and its people from the EU/Western-led immigrant onslaught and the left-liberal ideology that has done so much to undermine and destroy everything which once made Europe so great and noble.

Now, remind me, Karen, how many English, German, of French kings were elected? How many were executed by their own people?

Have you ever heard of the Roman Catholic Relief Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1829? Now, compare and contrast it with the Warsaw Confederation Act of 1573. A 256 year difference. You do know about the 30 year war just to the west of Poland-Lithuania, right? I could go on.

I am eager to hear how Orbán has dismantled judicial independence – especially that, as a Hungarian living in Hungary, I did not notice any such thing. I mean, if you have anything beyond the typical meaningless screams so typical of sore loser left-liberals

Why are you lying? It has never been a ban. Each year, every type of course that receives state funding is evaluated to see if it is worth the investment.
This year, gender studies have failed (like so many others before its time, except no one decided to start a Europe-wide screaming match about those.)
So, no, there is no ban.
Two universities have had gender studies courses. The large, historic one, ELTE released a statement the same day expressing that they are completely fine with it )their course had 18 students enrolled, so it was a very unpopular one, to begin with.)
The other one, TA-DAM, is the Soros university (CEU) that is a private institution and they can teach all the gender studies they want (because, again, there isn’t and never was a ban,) except and thankfully, none of it will be covered with my tax forints.

All the other “troubling” aspects of the Fidesz governance you mention are based on half-truths like this, which is quite a disappointment.

The Poles have only recently gotten their country back – from the Russians who occupied it from 1945 to 1989. Now the EU leaders want to give it away again – this time to Middle Eastern Muslims. The Poles take a look at European countries with large Muslim populations – England, France – and say: “No thank you very much!” This is not Fascism, it’s common sense.
If you progress far enough along the road called “liberalism”, eventually you get to a place called “chaos”. America is well down that road.

The recent Hungarian elections, by contrast, were vigorously contested by parties on both the left and right. Opposition billboards and signs were abundantly evident in Budapest and across the country. Public protests have not been suppressed. The internet is still an open forum for debate.

The Internet is. Still, all the traditional public media, one of the two larger tv channels, several other tv channels, all regional newspapers and most local papers are in the hands of government oligarchs and puppets. The largest independent Internet portal has just recently been bought by people very close to Orbán’s party.

There is nothing new to see a Westerner who came to live with us culturally traditional and touchy people (unlike the Americans or the British I presume), and understands us so well that he can explain us to his readers. Reeks a little bit from exoticism, but good enough for consumption in English. Government-dominated media already cite it in Hungary how even Americans think that the government is OK.
If anything, Hungarians don’t have a long historical memory but quite the opposite, and the state is actively obfuscating and mythologizing it as part of its propaganda, just like in Poland – is that not exactly a sign of creeping fascism?
Furthermore, it is not “less reasonable” that Euro-skepticism or opposition to immigration is damning evidence of creeping fascism but au contraire, a fact. *After* the Hungarian government took control of TV, radio,journals, newspapers, and ad agencies, and *after* it has spent tens of millions of dollars on racist propaganda (giant billboards showing just Africans) and anti-EU propaganda (“Stop Brussels!”) — using taxpayer money — opposition to immigration did increase, just as [insert your favorite analogy about a fascist state overtaking the media and spreading propaganda to manipulate public sentiment and cause moral panic].
But it’s true that it’s not as bad as in Russia where in turn it’s not as bad as in North Korea or Nazi Germany.

Fasict? The jews are in the grateset security in Europe in Hungary. One of them has publised an artical in HVG ( one of the biggest news paper in the left side) in connection with Sargentini report’ lying about Jews:

Re: Karen
Hmm..
“these places — which have exactly zero history of democratic institutions or practices older than 1989” – you need to read some history about “those places”.
Before being dismantled, Poland adopted in 1788 the 3 May Constitution, the first set of modern supreme national laws in Europe.
“Those places” also know a thing or two about foreign interference.

Poland, Hungary, and Romania are either tilting towards illiberalism, or they are not. What is funny is that they list a bunch of illiberal policies in an article trying to say they aren’t illiberal. Some of you pointed out the dismantling of judicial independence, but no one has made the religious connections either. These countries would definitely pick their religion if the choice was liberalism and Christianity. They pretty much have already stated their position on this.

Here in America, on conservative boards, I see a ton of support for what Poland and Hungary are doing. This is beyond disturbing.

Let me make a tiny factual correction to everyone who mentioned “Eastern Europe” here. Please take a look at the map of this Continent, and search the borders of it, mainly on the Eastern side. If you’re well educated in geographics, you’ll recognize that there is an almost larger distance from Hungary to the Eastern edge of Europe, than to the Western one. Hungary and some of its neighbours are in Central Europe, even though some people call it another way for example in the MSM. I think this is an elementary issue, especially for us here in Central Europe, in this more than thousand years old country. THX. BTW the writer has absolutely right: there is absolutely no need to judge us, to force us by leftlibs.

I reckon that your idea of being not racist would have been to show some Chinese and Eskimo, maybe a few native American on those ads – unfortunately, however, the Hungarian government presented the invaders as they were. Get out of your liberal bubble, dud.

This article is disappointing. I am glad several people challenged the idea that Orban “banned” gender studies. (It is simply a withdrawal of taxpayer funding, which few in Hungary or anywhere else in East-Central Europe support.) But more, the significance is sure that Poland, Hungary, and now possibly Romania (though it is unclear) are the only countries effectively challenging the political aggrandizement on the part of the judiciary: https://providencemag.com/2016/01/polands-constitutional-crisis-less-and-more-serious-than-it-appears/

This is an important article. I appreciate the spirited dissents. But, could I beg a bit less spirit and some additional references–e.g., to things like the withdrawal of funds from instead of the ban of gender studies…

We read info that is filtered by an increasingly partisan press. In the US, anything remotely illiberal is all lumped together with Trump, Brexit, China… Politics is complex.

In the nations of the former Soviet Union there SHOULD be some reticence to trade the yolk of Moscow for the yolk of Brussels even if the stakes are different. Would love to learn more. Thank you all